Cloudflare Workers Opens Edge Computing to Everyone

Industry-first solution makes Cloudflare the leader in edge computing

SAN FRANCISCO, March 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cloudflare, the leading Internet performance and security company, today announced the general availability of Cloudflare Workers, a new way for developers to deploy and execute their code directly at the edge of Cloudflare's global network.

Prior to Cloudflare Workers, there were two main places where developers could deploy code: front-end code running on an end user's device, or back-end code running in a central data center. Both have their drawbacks. Code running on an end user's device is difficult to update and is limited by power and bandwidth. Code running in a central data center can have substantial network latency and be subject to outages.

Cloudflare Workers gives developers a third place  to deploy their code close to their customers - at the edge of Cloudflare's ever-expanding global network - bringing the power and flexibility of a cloud data center, and the redundancy of a massively distributed system, within milliseconds of virtually every Internet user.

"Prior to today, the only way to write code that ran at the edge of Cloudflare's network was to be a Cloudflare employee. Cloudflare Workers opens the scale of our global network to any developer," explained Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "By bridging the front-end and back-end with a third place to develop code, we're excited Cloudflare Workers will empower a new class of applications that were previously impossible. I can't wait to see what developers build."

The benefits of Cloudflare Workers include:

• Programmable: Developers can deploy custom JavaScript code at the edge to intelligently respond to users on any browser or API client.
• Scalable: Cloudflare Workers runs across Cloudflare's 127+ data centers and dynamically scales to meet the demands of any load.
• Fast: Cloudflare's global network is within milliseconds of virtually every Internet user, allowing Cloudflare Workers to support latency-sensitive applications.
• Resilient: A globally-distributed, "serverless" architecture ensures that Cloudflare Workers is not hamstrung by any single point of failure.
• Unconstrained: Support for complex computing tasks without worrying about end users' bandwidth or battery burden.
• Affordable: Cloudflare Workers is priced at 50¢ per 1 million tasks, making its pricing easy to understand, globally consistent, predictable, and less expensive than centralized alternatives.
• Portable: Powered by JavaScript, the Internet's most popular programming language, Cloudflare Workers supports the same code that many developers have already used for their front- and back-end applications.
• Updatable: Developers can push updates to Cloudflare Workers and within seconds know their code has been deployed globally - without having to wait for end users to update their apps or centralized cloud platforms that can take half an hour or more to deploy code.
• Backward Compatible: Legacy static configuration languages like Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) or Edge Side Includes (ESI) can be automatically converted to dynamic Cloudflare Workers.

Cloudflare announced the Cloudflare Workers beta in September. Since then, customers in the beta have run billions of edge computing tasks using Cloudflare Workers.